Patrick Kavanagh was born in October 1904 in Mucker, Inniskeen, Co. Monaghan.

His father was a shoemaker, and Patrick also entered the trade after leaving school. Kavanagh never got beyond 6th class -"I majored in kicking a rag ball", but his education continued as he sat at his father's side and as he carried out the routine chores on the little farm.

For twenty years he lived the life of the ordinary young Irish farmer of the period, toiling for a few shillings' pocket money in fields he expected some day to inherit. Like all the other local farmers, he bought and sold at fair and market, went to Sunday Mass, attended wakes, funerals and weddings of neighbours, played pitch and toss at the crossroads, cycled to dances. He was also goalie for the Inniskeen Gaelic football team. It was through these every day moments that something of life revealed itself to Kavanagh.

He began to write verse in his early teens -"I dabbled in verse and it became my life"

He began submitting poems to local and national newspapers. In 1928 he walked to Dublin to meet and make his first contact with the literary world. Macmillan's of London published his first book of poetry "Ploughman and Other Poems" in 1936. They also gave Kavanagh an advance on a book about rural life thus "The Green Fool" was born.

He became increasingly dissatisfied with life as a small farmer, and in 1938 he left Inniskeen for London and remained there for about five months. In 1939 he finally settled in Dublin. There he was welcomed into the literary community as "The Ploughman Poet", but when it became clear that he had ambitions of being a great poet he soon lost his popularity. He eked out a living as a journalist, where his refusal to tell anything less than the whole truth made him an enemy of many.